🕶️ Founders in crisis: the toll of startup life on mental health

Six bullets of updates

1. 🔔 VCs are saying: Despite 2022's low $66.4M funding for digital therapeutics, VCs keep eyes on promising startups in the sector.

2. 👩🏾 Women in VC: Diversity boosts returns; female-led teams outperform all-male ones by 9.3%.

3. 🧠 Covariant unveils RFM-1, the 'ChatGPT for robots,' aiming to power billions of future bots with human-like reasoning abilities.

4. ☀️ In Mexico, the solar market is still nascent, but that's precisely why some entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the opportunity.

5. 🫰 Find out if you're underpricing and how to fix it! Many businesses misprice their products too low, costing them potential profits. 

6. 📢 Telegram founder Pavel Durov says the company will become profitable next year and plans to go public.

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Are you in the 61% of founders considering quitting their startup?

You're not alone if you've ever felt the urge to quit your startup. There's not much to imagine in understanding why some consider this possibility a severe option. The words "overworked," "exhausted," and "broken" appeared repeatedly in a survey conducted by Sifted with 156 technology startup founders. Some data summarizing the collected impressions include:

• 49% said they were considering quitting their startup in the next year.

• 45% said their mental health was 'bad' or 'very bad.'

• 85% said they experienced high stress in the last year.

• 75% said they felt anxiety during that same time.

Some tools to find the light at the end of the tunnel emphasize the importance of paying attention to exercise, proper nutrition, and quality time with family and friends. Regularly taking a break from your phone is also healthy. If you're going through a tough time, don't forget to share your concerns with someone else, including close friends, a coach, or a therapist. Find more alarming figures and tips to feel better in such a context.

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Startup Events and Deadlines

1. Financial Modeling Course  | Course | March 18 | Online 

2. SaaSOpen: Austin Conference | March 28 | Austin 

3. How Much Money Should You Raise? | Webinar | April 12 | Online

4. SaaSiest Sweden Conference | April 16 | Malmö, Sweden   

5. TechCrunch Stage 2024 Conference | April 25 | Boston

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These companies just raised money

1. 🇫🇷 What a boost! Parisian startup Zama secures $73M Series A funding for its breakthrough homomorphic encryption tech, eyeing blockchain and AI solutions.

2. 🇨🇴 Colombian fintech Yuno nabs $25M in Series A, reaching a $150M valuation, aiming to bolster its global payment infrastructure.

3. 🇧🇷 Climate tech Nextron raised $5.2M in a Series A. The funds will expand its presence and invest in customer acquisition.

4. 💦 Astek Diagnostics closed a $2M round for its urine diagnostics system.

5. 📚 Startup Analytica Ensino nets $800K, aiming to solve educational challenges with data analysis, currently serving 1.2M students.

6. 💊 Pharma-focused SaaS platform Proffer bags $600K seed funding to expand retail and distribution sectors.

7. 💳 Brazilian startup Trampay reels in $250K pre-seed funding from Potencia Ventures and plans to boost its user base and introduce physical payment methods.

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Musk is opening xAI’s code; guess why

One week after suing Sam Altman for "Unfair business practices" with his company OpenAI, Elon Musk announced that he will do something different with his own. The entrepreneur plans to open source the code of xAI's Grok, its chatbot, which directly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT 🤼‍♂️

Musk is doing exactly what he says OpenAI should have done, according to the original approach with which the company was founded. By open-sourcing xAI's code, the project would do the same as other tech giants, such as Meta and Mistral, by making their codes public to the audience.

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